Reed College, by the way charges, $50,000 a year for tuition. The opportunity to scream insults at a queer film director whose perspective is mildly different from today's leftist students is certainly an expensive privilege.
This is interesting. And spooky.
The findings showed that the evolution of the smallpox virus happened more recently than previously believed and that the
ancestor of all available smallpox viral strains were no older than 1580 albeit
it is not yet clear what animal is the true reservoir of the pathogen
and when the virus first jumped from animals to humans.
The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Current Biology on
Dec. 8, also found that the evolution of the pathogen into two
circulating strains, the variola major and minor, occurred after 1796,
after scientist Edward Jenner came up with a vaccine.
2 comments:
This article's summary is misleading. They are saying that all the _live_ virus samples we have evolved after 1580 - but those samples were collected with 20th century techniques, and mostly after researchers realized that vaccination was becoming so widespread that new samples would soon be unavailable. This speaks more to the narrowness of the preserved samples than to the evolution of smallpox. Most of the variola strains that once existed are extinct and unknown.
Probably.
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